Knowledge, literacy, and power

The importance of content knowledge and reading practices to the achievement of power was studied with adults. Relationships were examined among general, "mainstream" society knowledge, domain specific political knowledge, the amount of reading engaged in and three indicators of power, occupation, income and political activity. Care was taken to ensure that extraneous cognitive processing variance did not influence the results by using simple checklists of declarative knowledge that required listeners, on the telephone, to simply say "yes" if they thought they recognized a given factual stimulus. The results of two studies indicated that there were positive relationships among amount of content knowledge, reading and power, even when age, education and ethnicity were held constant. The latter is important because it indicates that regardless of one's cultural background, possession of large "banks" of declarative knowledge about the "mainstream" culture of the United States is associated with achieving and manifesting power. Knowledge, Literacy and Power In democratic nations that subscribe to meritocratic principles, it is generally assumed that "knowledge is power," and that, to a large extent, knowledge is based on literacy (Lerner, 1958). The traditional view has been that, as a general rule, the more literate a person is, the more knowledgeable the person will be and the more likely he or she is to gain access to socially privileged positions or to gain a status that carries with it the capacity for influencing the thoughts and behaviors of others in direct or indirect ways (Lipset, 1960; Verba & Nie, 1972; Wolfinger & Rosenstone, 1980). Today, however, among educators and other citizens alike, the importance of the acquisition of content knowledge as an outcome of education and as an important contributor to social status and power is in a state of ambivalence. On the one hand, education reformers such as Freire (1970) have argued against the "banking" concept of education in which the culture of the "dominant" classes is transmitted to the "oppressed" by requiring the latter to learn the facts, concepts, famous personalities, etc. of the "dominant" classes. He and various sympathizers have argued for an approach to education in which processes of "critical thinking" are emphasized over the acquisition ("banking") of content knowledge. Interestingly, Freire, heavily influenced by Marxist-socialist thinking, has recently been joined by businessmen who also argue against the "banking" approach to education. Robert W. Galvin, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Motorola Corporation has stated, "While most descriptions of necessary skills for children do not list "learning to learn," this should be the capstone skill upon which all others depend. Memorized facts, which are the basis for most testing done in schools today, are of little use in the age in which information is doubling every two or three years. We have expert systems in computers and the Internet that can provide the facts we need when we need them. Our workforce needs to utilize facts to assist in developing solutions to problems. The worker needs to be able to utilize the systems which give him or her "just-in-time" access to information when it's required in the problem-solving process." (Galvin, in Murnane & Levy, 1996, p. vxii) On the other hand, Hirsch (1987; 1996) has reviewed and argued against the position of many educators and researchers who call for the teaching of "critical thinking," "learning to learn," and other abstract cognitive processes over the teaching and learning of content knowledge. He argues for the importance of acquiring knowledge, that is, facts, names, concepts, and so forth, during the school years as the basis for being a knowledgeable, literate and productive adult who can continue to learn independently by reading. Hirsch has bolstered his arguments with references to the fairly large body of research that indicates the importance of "prior knowledge" for reading comprehension. Both Hirsch's arguments and research on the importance of "prior" and "background" knowledge in reading comprehension are reviewed by Bruer (1993, pp. 173-213). While Bruer indicates the importance of learning various cognitive and metacognitive strategies for improving reading and learning from text, he also agrees to a large extent with Hirsch regarding the importance of knowledge in making it possible to acquire new knowledge from texts. He points out the importance of having a large body ("bank") of vocabulary knowledge, background knowledge about the world around us, knowledge about topics for creating "gists," domain-specific knowledge for understanding texts in special areas of content, knowledge of literary forms and genres to aid in understanding special forms of texts, and the importance of "prior" or "background" knowledge in reading to learn new knowledge. Power, content knowledge, and cognitive processes In the present study we view "power" as indicated by the achievement of a higher status occupation and/or the ability to earn an average or higher level of income. These achievements empower the person in the mainstream society. Additionally, the more knowledgeable person is more likely to exercise the rights (power) of citizenship and to engage in political activities, such as voting, to advance his or her causes (Neuman, Just, & Crigler, 1992; Zaller, 1992). Through these means the more highly knowledgeable person joins the ranks of the influential in the "dominant" or "mainstream" society. Previous studies have confirmed relationships among literacy and the indicators of power outlined above; occupation, income and political activity, including voting (Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins & Kolstad, 1993; Sticht & Armstrong, 1994; Kaplan & Venezky, 1994). However, in these studies of literacy, declarative knowledge (i.e., factual or content knowledge available to people for use) is confounded with process skills of a largely unknown admixture. Because of this commingling of declarative knowledge and skills, it is not possible to use such studies to evaluate the role of content knowledge in empowering people. For instance, the prose, document and quantitative literacy tasks of the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) incorporated a number of "search and locate" and other cognitive skills that placed heavy demands on working memory. It is well established that working memory becomes increasingly less efficient with advanced age (Bernstein, Roy, Srull, & Wickens, 1988; Meyer, Marsiske, & Willis, 1993) so it is possible that the load on working memory contributed to the decline in performance observed for adults over the age of fifty (Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins & Kolstad, 1993, p. 31). Knowledge and literacy Several lines of research have converged to suggest that people become highly knowledgeable and highly literate largely by engaging in numerous literacy practices, such as reading books, magazines, newspapers, and so forth (Krashen, 1993; Reder, 1994; Kaplan & Venezky, 1994). A review of the major assessments of adult literacy in the United States revealed that, since 1937 it has repeatedly been found that for adults, as years of education increases there are corresponding increases in both the number of literacy practices in which adults